Twitter may either be the greatest prank ever played on the internet community or it may be the best thing since sliced bread. It’s easy to make the first case if you read the public timeline for a few minutes. It’s a bit harder to make the second case, but I’ll do my best to make it. Specifically, I’d like to take a stab at offering 140 health care uses for Twitter.

Twitter’s simplicity of functional design, speed of delivery and ability to connect two or more people around the world provides a powerful means of communication, idea-sharing and collaboration. There’s potency in the ability to burst out 140 characters, including a shortened URI. Could this power have any use in healthcare? After all, for example, doctors and nurses share medical information, often as short bursts of data (lab values, conditions, orders, etc.).

CHALLENGES OF HEALTH CARE MICRO-SHARING

Unlike most other kinds of uses of Twitter (daily exchanges between friends, the kind of work @Comcastcares does, etc.), health care related matters pose unique challenges, including but not limited to:

The possibilities that I believe Twitter offers currently far exceeds the constraints. I won’t offer work-around solutions to these constraints in this post. I want to focus on the possibilities because once we see the potential, we may have stonger motivations to deal intelligently with the constraints. So when reading this list, don’t get hung up on the details, the fears, the anxieties that may be provoked by the realities of health care as it is practiced today. It’s the 21st Century: let’s be imaginative, determined and innovative. Let’s be remarkable.

In the health care industry there is often a fine line between caution and fear. It is the fear of change so common in health care that I hope we can overcome. Twitter may be a proving ground of how we overcome our fears, satisfy our cautions and extend the reach of our health care system with web-based technologies and communities.

What follows are uses than can be adopted right now and uses that remain to be developed. What do you think health care will look like in 2099? Will we still be using paper medical records or will we be using technologies that other industries use? Will we transcend our accustomed ways of thinking and re-socialize ourselves for how we interact with each other in an exponentially changing technoscape?

I hope this list sparks debate to help answer those questions. Here are the suggestions.

There they are: 140 health care uses for micro-sharing platforms like Twitter. Implementing these uses can be enormously challenging (and even impossible) on Twitter given today’s constraints. For many of these uses, other more robust and secure micro-sharing platforms will be needed (e.g. Yammer or ESME). Certainly, Twitter offers a model of how micro-sharing can be used for a wide range of purposes. If social media marketers can figure out how to use Twitter, health care professionals can also figure out how to use micro-sharing.

HEALTH CARE SHOULD BE THE LEADER IN MICRO-SHARING

With 26 letters in the alphabet arranged within 140 characters, there are over 1.2 x 10^198 possible character combinations (thank you @symtym). Of course, the number of meaningful sentences is far less than that but a point stands out: there’s a virtually infinite number of short pulses of (meaningful) information that Twitter can facilitate.

With that kind of power, health care should be a leader in micro-sharing, not a lagger.

WHAT HAVE I MISSED? WHAT CAN YOU CONTRIBUTE?

I have probably missed some incredibly important healthcare uses for Twitter. I am also probably missing specific Twitter accounts that should be included as links in the list. Please contribute and I will continue to refine the list.

Visitors: please add to the list, make comments, ask questions, offer critique. It’s your health, it’s your century and it’s your right and responsibility to make this list as practical as possible. I’m doing my best to do my part. Your turn.

Thanks for your comments about health care systems/providers using Twitter and the like. I too have been trying to figure out its utility, especially of late. I have an account (@pjdorio) and have been tweeting relevant comments to radiology, interventional radiology, nch hospital system (my hospital system) and ndic (my clinics) in Naples, Florida. The tweets I have been posting are attempts to inform and hopefully offer insight into “why should I care about…” ndic/nch/radiology/paul dorio, etc. Although I have not yet gotten any replies, it is apparent to me that Twitter has progressed and is definitely and up and coming communication network, similar to Facebook, only a bit more one-way and open-ended. If you have any other suggestions to offer, which could help me get my message out (Namely: “I and the people I work with are the greatest thing since sliced bread and here’s why”) I’d appreciate any suggestions you may have. Thanks very much!

Phil,
Hey, just wanted to throw out an unsolicited update. I’ve been using Twitter like crazy since I first posted on your site and it has been fascinating. The speed of information dissemination is great. I typically will see headlines, links, etc about news that then gets broadcast hours later on traditional media. In addition, I’ve found an outlet that hopefully will help me reach more people and help them to the best of my abilities. Web 2.0 is definitely changing the ball game. I can’t wait to see what is just around the proverbial corner. Happy tweeting/blogging/IM’ing (email is almost as slow as snail mail at this point!)

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These is a wonderful list of future applications in Twitter! It would be helpful to see when and how they have been applied by professionals since 2009! Technology has evolved, and a follow-up article will be of great value to all healthcare readers! Any feedback from practitioners who have applied these techniques, and how it has worked out for them? Thank you for putting this discussion forward!

Thanks Phil,
I appreciate all of the insights that you provided regarding the uses of Twitter. I believe we will find that the utilization of social media platforms, such as twitter, will play a large part in public health education and personal health issues. So, I appreciate anyone who recognizes the potential of social networking platforms this early in the game. (Yes, it is still early in the game)

I am interested in the use of twitter for nurse advocacy efforts, such as with lobbying efforts and health policymaking.

Would you happen to have any leads on nursing organizations that are doing this well on social networking platforms?